From 2009: Phish concert brought in $7 million or more to Hampton

— Phish was expected to be really good for business, but not this good.

The local economic effect from the band's three-day rock concert reunion at Hampton Coliseum was estimated to be about $5 million for everything from the cost of hotel rooms to restaurant meals and retail-store sales, said Ryan LaFata, a spokesman for Hampton Convention & Visitor Bureau.

The new estimate is $7million to $8million, although official numbers are still being calculated, LaFata said.

Just how much is that?

Imagine if the Hampton Jazz Festival went on for a week and a half or two weeks, and that's how much was brought into local businesses, LaFata said.

Hooters at the corner of Coliseum Drive and Mercury Boulevard had a tie-dyed banner that read, "Hooters is Phish friendly." Servers dressed in their trademark orange shorts and tie-dyed tank tops played around in the parking lot with water balloons and hula hoops as Phish fans from as far away as Germany and Hawaii came to get burgers and beer. Some fans were in head-to-toe costumes, and servers made as much as $400 in tips on just Saturday and Sunday.

"We did one week's worth of sales in three days," said Hooters manager Desiree Mulligan. "It was good for business. They were good people, fun to be around."

At the Cold Stone Creamery in the Power Plant retail district, employees were called into work on their day off. The ice-cream shop next to McFadden's Restaurant and Saloon did three times as much business as a normal weekend, said Manager Markus Summers."Busy is not the word for it," he said. "It was crazy."

Business wasn't limited to the area around Hampton Coliseum. The Crowne Plaza Hampton Marina hotel on Settlers Landing in downtown Hampton was sold out Friday through Sunday.

"It went very well," said General Manager Don Davis.

In fact, every hotel room in Hampton was booked — about 3,200 in total, according to the visitor bureau. The thousands of people who came to Hampton Roads for three sold-out Phish shows also booked hotel rooms as far away as Norfolk and Williamsburg, and packed some rooms with four people.

It wasn't just hotels and restaurants that fared well. Fans also needed other services, like a mechanic. On Monday afternoon, three Phish fans from Gunnison, Colo., strolled the Power Plant while waiting for their Subaru Outback to be fixed before driving back home.

The Subaru owner, college student Jeff Petermann, said he and his two friends rotated drivers during the 40-hour trek from Colorado to Hampton.

"We're just waiting on the car," Petermann said.

The city benefited from the attention in another way: Media attention. This was the first Phish concert in five years, which attracted reporters from a long list of newspapers, magazines and television outlets — including MTV, USA Today, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, AOL, MSNBC and E! Online.